Conversation

From our first day, we've focused on the future of work -- investing in founders who use technology to make work more humane and more productive. If we learn from communities outside the technology industry, we might not have to choose!

Before investing in startups, I spent time in many a place... as an exec at a big corporation, a founder, university faculty, a government staffer, head of a non-profit. Every experience gave me a lens, and I now need them all... because so much of what we believed was wrong!

Let’s start with what's clear: Technology has reinvented our life life (shopping, family, friendships) so much less than it’s changed our daily work -- the thing we do with more of our waking hours than anything.

Yet most ways technology has changed work -- automating the rote, offering work on demand, opening communication channels -- have failed to make work pay for the vast majority of people. amazon.com/Ghost-Work-Sil

@marylgray

(Though they have made things cheaper to buy…)

Technology is a force of nature -- we can shape it, we can harness it (and should!), but we can’t roll it back.

The Current State of Machine Intelligence

Our fund was blind, six years ago, to the technology trend that would most change work: machine intelligence. A year later we were (over my foolish objection) the first venture capital fund to declare a focus on “AI.” (Save, thanks to

@shivon

medium.com

I spent the last three months learning about every artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data related startup I could find — my current list has 2,529 of them to be exact. Yes, I should find…

2:32 PM · Aug 14, 2019Twitter Web App

Replying to

We’ve done our homework about work. We read the books and articles by journalists, economists, technologists, and thinkers deep too many to count… and we’ve tried to study the future of work for everyone, not just people sitting at keyboards in San Francisco or New York.

(Though we do see much of that keyboard-work as a harbinger.) github.com/Bloomberg-Beta

Stellar tutors taught us much. That the future is already here, and that working people want, above all else, stability and dignity. ⤵️

Findings of Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology

A commission of American leaders (facilitated by

@NewAmerica

and co-chaired by

@slaughterAM

) showed us how technology might affect work over the next decades. Turns out the “will the robots take the jobs” tug of war might matter less than we think...

shiftcommission.work

What do a hundred American leaders find when they compare different possibilities for the effect of technology on work’s future?

The University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, founded by

@professor_ajay

, co-hosted an annual summit with us to bring together businesspeople and machine intelligence experts, as we think about how to lead companies through the coming transition… machinelearnings.co/were-waiting-f

Working people already dealing with automation -- from accountants automating audits to Walmart managers dealing with the cash recycler to truck drivers watching early self-driving semis roll -- showed us, again, the so-called “future” is now.

Who will find the first silver unicorn?

Working people caring for an elderly family member -- who, themselves, sometimes are also working, as more older Americans will -- showed us the most important demographic to understand about the future of work isn’t millennials. It’s older people.

also.roybahat.com

Written with Ai-jen Poo

The government and people of Stockton helped us anticipate the experiment to raise the floor by giving people cash grants, thanks to

@MichaelDTubbs

@EconSecProj. (Turns out, stability is freeing!)

Working people consistently explained they want two things from work (and “meaning” isn’t one of them, unless they make more than $150,000 per year). More on what they want, (1) stability and (2) dignity: ted.com/talks/roy_baha

We delved into studying the line of work we know most intimately: starting companies. ⤵️

Incarcerated people showed us that natural entrepreneurship lives in the hardest soil. Thanks to

@AshleyCVCF

, we visited the country’s first vocational high school for entrepreneurship… in Fresno! (Turns out, founders are in all the places.)

Quote Tweet

· May 22, 2019

Today's field trip: with founders and friends to the country's first high school for entrepreneurship, in Fresno. There to support student entrepreneurs and learn how students learn to start things! Lessons to come in this thread.

Patiño juniors, see you in an hour(ish)...

Show this thread

What this Silicon Valley VC learned on the ‘Rust Belt Safari’

Members of Congress, led by

@TimRyan

, took us on tours of cities around the U.S. (Columbus, Flint, Detroit, Youngstown, South Bend

@PeteButtigieg

, Atlanta, et. al.) to get technology companies to thrive in and relocate to those places. All happening!

vox.com

There are plenty of ways for tech to play in the "comeback cities" of the heartland.

Data tutored us, too: it allowed us to identify the specific people most likely to start companies in the future -- “Future Founders.” Turns out, it’s a more diverse group than current founders -- which shocked absolutely nobody. nytimes.com/2015/07/02/ups

Now that we know the issues better, how do we address them? I’m a technology investor, so I put that lens on first. (And we're getting to the punchline here...) ⤵️

The technology industry is getting tomatoes thrown at it daily -- for reasons that are, in the main, fair. Many want to slow technology, even stop it. That would be foolish -- though we can direct the way it unfolds. The time to do that is now.

This exact moment ,when people and governments grow afraid of the power of technology companies, also happens to be when we need technology the most. Our elemental challenges, like climate change, and universal human thriving, demand every ounce of our invention.

We in technology need to take our power, and our responsibility for it, more seriously if we want to keep delivering on a better future.

Leaders at all levels of the technology industry should be trading talent, ideas, and understandings with our peers in government, culture, the academy, and the communities we claim to serve -- instead of just trading barbs.

Tech: To Regulate or Not to Regulate?

As clueless as people in government are about technology, people in technology are clueless about government. We can do something about that! youtube.com/watch?v=KvPxVw (Of course

@sarafenskebahat

noticed I missed a belt loop!)

youtube.com

And if it should be, how?Subscribe to Fortune - http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=FortuneMagazineVideoFORTUNE is a global leader in busines...

We try to do our part

@BloombergBeta

by giving founders opportunity to cultivate relationships with leaders outside of technology: government officials, experts writing books, cultural leaders.

We’re learning to offer a dialogue that puts any one technology startup in the bigger conversation about our society and economy. (By the time startups get IPO-powerful, it’s usually too late… so we need much more of this, faster.)

If we can connect the technology community more deeply to ideas, leaders, and communities that we profoundly affect with our work, then maybe we can realize the benefits of technology for the next hundred years, in a way that benefits all of us.

That better future, where we harness the gale force of technology, is at risk.

I believe that in connecting technology with leaders and communities in other walks of life, we, in the technology industry, should take responsibility for boring our end of the Chunnel. Others will meet us before we get to the other side. /end (phew)